The invention relates to a treatment applied to wafer comets for packaging a food product, the wafer being consumed by the user at the same time as the food product thereby packaged. More particularly, the invention relates to the production of comets for packaging an ice-cream.
When an ice-cream is packaged in a conical cornet made from wafer, it is imperative to protect the wafer from contact with the ice-cream, without which the wafer loses its crunchy nature, which is a major handicap in terms of marketing. It has thus been proposed, in a known manner, to produce, on the inner wall of the conical wafer cornet, a layer of a coating agent consisting of chocolate, this layer forming a barrier between the wafer and the ice-cream packaged therein. The production of this sealing barrier involves a constraint, since it is necessary for the barrier to be totally continuous, otherwise the least gap in the coating gives rise to a loss of the crunchy nature of the wafer at least in the entire zone surrounding said gap. In order to prevent any risk of a fault and thus to guarantee the quality of the product marketed, it was thus decided to significantly increase the quantity of chocolate used as inner coating for the cornet, said chocolate being delivered into the cornet in the liquid state by means of a spray head that sprays it into the upper part of the cornet. However, although the spraying thus carried out prevents any risk of a gap, it results in a highly excess quantity of chocolate being used compared with that which would be just necessary to produce a continuous, uniform layer on the inner wall of the wafer cone such that the excess flows towards the bottom tip of the wafer cone, i.e. towards the point of the cone. This situation gives rise to a number of drawbacks: firstly, if the lower part of the cone is filled with chocolate, the consumer purchasing an ice-cream cone is left with a product that contains a smaller quantity of ice-cream than that which he was entitled to expect when seeing the external size of the cone, since the lower part of the cone is filled with chocolate; secondly, the quantity of chocolate used in manufacture is markedly greater than that necessary for coating the wafer, such that the cost price of the product is significantly increased; thirdly, the chocolate that has flowed into the lower part of the cone forms a mass which cools more slowly than the thin coating layer with the result that the manufacturing cycle for the finished product is longer because it is not possible to insert the ice-cream before the chocolate has solidified.